Vendor Risk Management Insights

The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities represent an entirely new class of security flaws that are deeply rooted in long-standing CPU architecture. As such, Meltdown and Spectre are likely the first of many issues that will have to be dealt with quickly as research in CPU security flaws intensifies. Tactically, it is important that you ensure your third-parties implement the necessary patches. Strategically, it is essential that you reassess your standards governing third-party use of cloud-hosting providers and implement measures to bring your third-parties into compliance with the updated standards.

In this document, we provide a brief explanation of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities and why they are so impactful, particularly to cloud computing. We also suggest a tactical plan for addressing the issue with your third-parties, and recommend strategic considerations for your larger third-party risk-governance program.

We speak with many clients that already have some form of governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) program in place to assist with managing their enterprise programs. And some have software solutions to help them manage the process. This is not surprising when the market for GRC solutions is expected to grow to $38 billion by 2021.

Most companies are seeking ways to obtain more value from their GRC system—often by extending their coverage to their third-party risk management programs. Using the new class of continuous vendor security monitoring solutions is one of the best ways to add immediate value to GRC. This pairing offers a number of benefits, such as speed to identify and manage risk, valuable insight for prioritization of response, visibility into an accurate and complete vendor IT footprint, and critical transparency of exposure and actionable information on inherited vulnerabilities.

Mitigating your third-party exposure to Apache Struts2 requires accurate, actionable data -- and fast. If you can apply automated techniques to rapidly identify which of your vendors are most likely exposed to the exploit, you can quickly prioritize your risk resources and engage constructively with impacted vendors.

More and more enterprises are increasing their budgets for threat intelligence in order to stay on top of the latest security risks. The dramatic increase in third party cyber security risk seems to make it another area where threat intelligence can be applied. But is threat intelligence actually a good fit for your third-party risk management program?

One of the most common questions we’re asked is how to incorporate continuous monitoring into a third-party risk management program. In part one of this two-part blog, we discussed beginning with the end state in mind to establish goals for your continuous monitoring program and suggested you jumpstart your program with a pilot. So once the pilot is complete, now what?

Like many organizations today, you have existing processes, tools and people laser-focused on analyzing periodic vendor security questionnaires, documentation, and on-site reviews. Moving to a continuous monitoring program can be daunting. Our advice: Don’t focus on where to start…think about where you want to end up. Begin with the end state in mind.